


The Rain Said to the Wind, "You Push and I'll Pelt"

by grand_adventure_running



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Temporary Amnesia, this was supposed to be an angst meme fill but it's just
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 17:25:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6714055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grand_adventure_running/pseuds/grand_adventure_running
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s cold, unseasonably rainy for August. The only source of warmth is Peter’s own breath against his wrist. He’s lying face down in the damp earth turning quickly to mud, the thick scent of it lingering in the back of his mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rain Said to the Wind, "You Push and I'll Pelt"

**Author's Note:**

> Meant to a fill for a random angst meme seen on Tumblr, but it just turned into hurt/comfort. Prompt: "I'm coming, just sit tight!"

Rain falls on the forest, pitter-pattering, drumming on the leaves. It fills the creek to flooding, the fast-running water a susurrus of noise reaching through the trees, eventually finding Peter on the slick forest floor. Errant raindrops find their way past the tree cover, landing on the ferns and wildflowers, the weeds and the moss below, occasionally dripping onto Peter’s cheek. It drizzles from the trees, beating its own trickling stream through the dirt.

It’s cold, unseasonably rainy for August. The only source of warmth is Peter’s own breath against his wrist. He’s lying face down in the damp earth turning quickly to mud, the thick scent of it lingering in the back of his mouth. His clothes are soaked through, the chill chasing through his skin to his bones.

His body hurts and he knows he’s been hurt, but he can’t remember how. Can’t remember much of anything, really. Peter reaches for the phone in his jeans pocket, but his arm is weak and torturously slow, his fingertips numb and fumbling. A bolt of pain goes through his shoulder and down his back. Breathing through it, he thumbs the phone to light up the display, then squints until his eyes focus on the time: 3:22p.m. He presses the call button and then comes to the slow realization that he doesn’t know who to call, or what those numbers might be. The list of most recent calls says he spoke with “Roman” at 12:35, so he presses that entry to call Roman back.  The sound of it ringing out hurts his head.

“Peter?”

He opens his eyes, not remembering closing them, and sees the duration of the phone call ticking up from 0:04 to 0:05.

“Where the hell are you?” Roman asks, and his voice is pitched low and tight. Peter squints at the phone.

“Roman?” he asks, because that’s all he knows. “Right? You’re Roman?”

“What, are you high or something? Is that why no one can find you—you went off somewhere and shot up?”

Roman speaks too quickly, his voice sharp and jabbing at Peter’s ears. Maybe he shouldn’t have called Roman. He doesn’t sound like the kind of person inclined to help.

“I don’t know where I am,” he says to the phone, the words leaving him in a mumble.

“Great. Just—fucking great. What do you see?”

“Trees.”

Roman sounds like he’s choking back a laugh. Peter doesn’t like it.

“It’s raining,” he continues. “Cold. I think I’m hurt. I don’t know…I don’t know where I am.” Roman has gone silent, so Peter continues to fill it. “M’tired. I don’t know what I was doing.  Hurts.”

“Peter,” Roman says and his voice is different than before. Worried, maybe, which is better, Peter thinks. “Did something happen? You and Lynda said there was something in the woods—are you hurt?”

Lynda. Familiar, somehow, and warm. He mouths her name as if it could grant him some kind of protection from the cold.

“Peter, when you called me, when you asked if it was me…do you know who I am? Do you remember anything?”

He shivers. “I don’t know.”

“ _Fuck_.” Roman takes a breath. “Try to remember, where are you? How did you get there?”

Peter moves his head in a tiny shake. “I don’t know.”

“Try!”

His eyes close. “I can’t.”

He can hear Roman’s quick breathing through the phone. “What—what do you hear? Are you near the river?”

The rush of it, swollen with water, is easily heard over the rain. “Y-yes.”

“Well, it’s a start,” Roman mutters.

Peter doesn’t say anything. His body hurts, his head hurts, even his bones ache with the cold, and it becomes an all-over, inescapable pain. He wants to be somewhere warm, out of the rain and out of the forest. Maybe after that he can be more appropriately concerned with his loss of memory.

“Roman,” he murmurs. Just to say it. Just to have something that is not cold or wet or painful.

“Peter, I’m coming, just sit tight. I’ll find you!”

And then it is silent for so long that Peter opens his eyes to look at the phone, to see if the call duration is still counting. But it’s not. The display simply reads, “call ended; 7:41.”

He’s alone, but the fact that he is feels distant from him, perhaps a little unimportant. He had been alone when he woke up, after all, what would be the difference now?

Still, he thinks Roman should have stayed on the phone. Peter would have liked that, although he doesn’t think he would tell anyone that.

Time passes in bouts of rain. Water never ceases falling from the leaves or from the trees, dripping and trickling, but the rain showers come and go. Not even the light changes, not really, the sky so consistently overcast. 

The river sounds the loudest when it’s not raining, like the hiss of an angry animal. Sound comes and goes, like he’s sleeping, but not. Blips is how he thinks of them. 

He is so cold.

Roman.

 

Blip.

 

“ _Peter!_ ”

 

Blip.

 

“ _Peter, can you hear me!_ ”

 

Blip.

 

“— _Jesus_. Peter! Hey! Look at me!”

He blinks, sees only blurry shapes, smears of color. His eyes won’t focus, he’s too tired. Something moves him, touches him, and he whimpers because it hurts. 

“Sorry, _fuck_. I just—you’re too goddamn cold and I don’t know—are you bleeding anywhere?”

Peter doesn’t answer him.

Blip.

 

 

When he wakes up, Peter is somewhere warm, his extremities tingling with it. It smells familiar and something deep in him says it belongs to him. His room in the trailer. A trailer with—Lynda.  His mom, Lynda. That feels right, feels good.

He tries moving, tries stretching sleep-dull muscles, but the instantaneous protest makes him grit out a pained noise. Someone hears it, he can hear them walking towards him.

“Peter?” It’s Roman’s voice. Roman—a confusing tangle of memories and emotions accompany him, but Peter remembers, slowly and not all at once. “You awake?”

“Roman.”

A pale face with dark blonde hair moves into his line of view. “Yeah, you remember me?” This time, Peter can hear the tug of humor, disguising the uncertain waver in his voice.

“Yeah.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” he utters quietly. “Do you remember what happened today?”

He peers up at Roman, blinking until he comes into focus. “There was something in the woods,” he says.

“Yeah, and you fucking went out to find it alone and it fucking found you first.”

“Wh’wassit.”

“A, uh,” Roman waves his hand carelessly, “I don’t fucking know, a something-cock. Bangkok, Babcock, I don’t know.”

“ _What._ ” Peter strains to get the word out.

“Lynda knows! She and Destiny went out to get rid of it. It’s some kind of undead spirit. It hunts people in the woods and steals their liver after beating them nearly unconscious.”

Peter frowns. “My…?”

Roman puts a hand on him to stop his hands’ fumbled search for his abdomen. “Don’t worry, you’re still in one piece. Destiny says it probably didn’t like your skanky werewolf ass.”

“Fuck off,” Peter grunts.

“Hey, I’m just saying that being a werewolf is probably what saved your life.” And then Roman goes quiet.

Peter watches him, how his eyes drop and scan over Peter’s body on the bed, lingering like he can see things through the blanket. And Peter can feel each and every corresponding hurt that Roman’s eyes pick out. He had mentioned that the spirit beats its victims; it matches perfectly how Peter feels.

“Do you remember,” Roman begins, uncertainly, “our phone call this afternoon?”

He remembers not knowing Roman, remembers calling him regardless and thinking he was an ass. The judgment may not be all that far off, but he’d been wrong about Roman helping. It should be forgiven, Peter had forgotten everything else about him, too, not just Roman’s inevitability to involve himself with Peter.

His mouth makes a shape that’s not quite a smile, but not yet a grimace. “Must have sounded like an idiot.”

Roman pauses. “No, the one before that. Earlier.”

The memory is hazy, too close to the attack to retain everything. “I called you ‘bout the—the cock thing.” He raises his eyebrows to indicate how much he thinks the spirit is actually called that. “That it was in the woods. You said I went looking for it.”

“Yeah, but—.” Roman’s hand darts up to his mouth in a nervous gesture, biting at his thumbnail. “There was more.”

Peter looks at him blankly. “Sorry.”

His expression falls, just a little, and he looks away like he can hide how disappointed he is.

“What’d I say?”

Roman glances at him and their eyes catch on each other, holding.  “Actually, I had asked you something.”

“Yeah?”

“If you’d meet me later.”

“And what did I say?”

“You said…yes.”

Peter can feel the tension between them like a line pulled taut, anchored in his chest. “You keep looking at me like I’m going to break.”

Roman crosses the room to him. “You could have died.” He says it plainly, as if it could mean less if said without the appropriate gravity.

“I didn’t.” Peter pulls his arms out from beneath the blanket, pushing it down because he’s too warm now.  The movement hurts, pulling at bruises that must go bone deep, but he ignores it.

Roman bends over him, fingers ghosting over the surface of the mattress. “There’s a line over your stomach, right where it would have cut you open. It’s just a scratch, must have realized you weren’t all human right then, but it’s there. You’re covered in bruises, your whole back…and there’s an arrow wound from where it shot you. See, it has this poison that makes you fall asleep, makes you forget.”  Roman searches his face for something. Peter’s not sure what he finds.  “You called me.”

There is the slightest of stresses on “me,” surprise, maybe, that Peter would call him, out of anyone.

“You were the last person I called.”

That doesn’t seem to dampen whatever Roman finds valuable about Peter calling him, and, fine, Roman can have it.

“You kept saying my name,” he says. “I could hear it on the phone and, then, when I got there. I don’t think you even knew you were doing it.”

Peter feels it in the pit of his stomach, gravity shifting from buoyancy to something far denser. For a split second, he’s back on the rain-slicked forest floor with the cold sinking its teeth into his bones and the water splashing his face, the sound of it filling up his ears, how he held on to one word that entire time.

“That’s all I had,” he says quietly.

Roman leans closer. “I don’t mind,” he says.

His proximity gives away his warmth to Peter, like some kind of generous sun, and his breath tickles faintly against Peter’s skin. 

“Good,” Peter murmurs, because it isn’t good manners to leave an offer of permission like that hanging. He reaches up to frame Roman’s face, his thumb brushing against Roman’s bottom lip.

Roman catches the wrist of that hand, turns his head into the touch to press his mouth against Peter’s palm. His lips don’t move, but it’s a kiss all the same. Peter’s fingers curl over the spot when Roman leans down past the reach of his hands to hover above his mouth, so close that Peter’s nerves tingle with it. His eyes move over Peter’s face like a physical caress and then he closes the gap between them, his mouth both soft and firm on Peter’s.

Peter lets his hands rest on Roman’s back as some means of support while he presses back against Roman’s lips, feeling the firmness of his teeth behind them. When Roman pulls back, his lips are kissed red, inspiring a measure of self-satisfaction in Peter.

“Missed our date. It’s after seven, now.”

“I can make it up to you, seeing as it’s my fault.”

Roman studies him, just as self-satisfied, but when he speaks his voice lacks the sly angle Peter’s had taken.

“This is good,” he says, and then he proceeds to touch him carefully and kiss him slowly.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun trivia: the monster Roman fails to remember is called a Baykok. From Cherokee legend, said to appear as a skeleton with glowing red eyes. It has no known weaknesses, but it’s possible to destroy it by cracking its bones to splinters and setting them on fire. The victim is said to live without any knowledge of their liver being taken for days or weeks without any side effects, and then they suddenly become ill, inevitably wasting away and dying. The Baykok only hunts humans (specifically, warriors), so it’s possible that it might not go after a werewolf, or an upir for that matter.


End file.
